Lucky 50-plus In Right Spot

THE NATION'S HOUSING

April 23, 1989|By Kenneth R. Harney

If you're a homeowner between 50 and 65, you should be asking yourself: Do I have a realistic plan to make maximum use of my real estate assets to ensure that I'm in the right housing for the 1990s, and then into the 21st century?

If you're like many in your age group, according to new research, you're not thinking about it in those terms. You're relatively comfortable where you are. You feel years younger than your age. You see no reason to think long or hard - not yet - about housing alternatives for the coming two decades.

You're part of what a major new market study calls the ''Luckies'' - a generation of Americans with the resources and time to map out pre-retirement and retirement housing plans unlike any before you, and possibly any later generation. You may not see yourself that way, but sophisticated market researchers do.

The Luckies are what the big advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather calls the mass market of 50- to 65-year-old consumers. Based on what the firm describes as extensive studies, consumer interviews and ''focus groups'' conducted nationwide, Ogilvy & Mather's portrait of the Luckies is economic and attitudinal. It was unveiled for a meeting of seniors-housing proponents sponsored by the South Carolina Retirement Communities Association.

If you're a Lucky:

- You bought your first and possibly subsequent homes at what have proved to be the century's most favorable interest-rate and price combinations. Your real estate assets have grown to values you'd never have imagined, while your mortgage balances have declined to zero or nearly so.

- You may not think of yourself as wealthy - you're middle-class - but you and your colleagues in the 50-plus age group control the lion's share of the nation's assets, including 70 percent of national household net worth. As a group you control $7 trillion worth of assets, make $800 billion a year, and have $150 billion left over after paying all your bills.

- Distinct from the generation immediately preceding you, you were touched by the Great Depression, but not molded by it. You experienced World War II, but your formative economic experience occurred immediately after the war. That era of the 1950s and early 1960s turned out to be the greatest sustained, large-scale economic expansion and income growth in American history. You had to work hard to get ahead, but if you did, the opportunities were there. Now you're comfortable enough to relax a little, enjoy more of what you made.

- Compared with the 40- to 49-year-olds behind you and 65- to 75-year-olds ahead of you, you also are more likely to tell researchers that you feel significantly younger than your chronological age - 15 years younger at the upper limits, according to the study.

That broad-brush portrait may not be you. But researchers see it as having particular validity for seniors' housing choices during the 50-to-65-years-of-age period. The market message, they believe, is powerful. On the one hand, the crop of young seniors has the capital resources and time to choose their housing alternatives for the coming two decades or more.

On the other hand, the American home-building industry has an unparalleled opportunity for new growth by creating forms of housing, and entire communities, specifically geared to this upbeat, active generation of pre-retirees and early retirees.

Essential ingredients for both sides of the equation, market experts agree, are residential environments that offer significantly higher levels of recreational and social amenities than their predecessors, particularly tennis courts, golf courses, health-clubs and other high-energy outlets.

Another new key is a greater sense of age-group inclusiveness in the community, rather than the more traditional exclusivity. Although young empty-nesters don't want to listen to screaming kids around the clock, research demonstrates that they are far more interested in living in age-integrated communities than the old stereotype suggests.

Neill Cameron, Atlanta-based managing director of Ogilvy & Mather, says one of the underlying ''psychographic'' rules for creating housing for the 50-plus Luckies is that it not cut them off from younger adults, and that it never, ever, suggest to them through design or marketing that they are ''old.''

What does all this mean if you're a Lucky? For starters, ask yourself if you're truly in the right house for the coming five years, 10 years and beyond. Are you one of the many Luckies in houses too big for your real needs, too costly in taxes, utilities? Are you in functionally obsolete, though highly salable, housing, better suited for a younger couple who could renovate it?

If the answer is yes or maybe, be aware: Community developers in metropolitan-fringe and resort locations, north and south, are tuning into your real needs.